This day, 2 April, 1999, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court sentenced Ma Ke and Jiang Tao, the murderers who robbed and killed Zou Jingmeng, Member...
It’s much easier to get maple syrup these days. Canadian president Justin Trudeau just announced the construction of a new pipeline to export it to the rest of the world (…or was that another liquid commodity?)
Anyway, when I was a child, our family received a bottle of this treasured syrup. Before that day, we had only known the “simulated” stuff. We then waited months before opening this bottle of “the real thing”; no moment seemed important enough, no pancake perfect enough.
And then we did open it, only to find...
It’s not yellow. Let’s get that out of the way first.
The leaves are as green as Act One in Sonic. And the drink; well, green tea makes a pale yellow drink anyway, so there’s no room for differentiation there.
It all reminds me of that ad for Canada’s Red Rock cider; “It’s not red and there are no rocks in it”.
But, for Westerners like me, there’s perhaps always been a need for “Yellow Tea” to exist.
Fascinated by the variety of Camellia Sinensis; from oxidised to unoxidised, with additional parameters like...
Well, I just don’t think it happened like that.
It relies on too many coincidences. It can’t be the true origin of tea-drinking, surely.
For the emperor, Shen Nong (神農), to have received a stray, falling leaf of camellia sinensis in his cup of boiling water relies on that tea plant being very tall, or the weather very windy. It’s the height thing.
And why do these apocryphal breakthroughs always happen to bigwigs like emperors, not to ordinary folk and earnest experimenters? Doesn’t wash with me.
But if the Emperor’s cup was the...
Some 2 years ago, with the passing of Elizabeth II, I speculated in these pages that the late Queen would become, principally, the woman crowned in 1953, young and beautiful. I suspect that was an image she herself was comfortable with. Certainly, she was slow in commissioning coins and stamps updating her profile, happy to issue retro instead.
Just recently, we lost another “National Treasure”. Even if you don’t know her from Downton Abbey, or The West End, you’ll know her as Professor McGonagall, Housemistress of Gryffindor. The actress Dame...
